When 350 thousand troops from 20 countries join a military exercise that involves over 20 thousand tanks,250 jet fighters and more than 400 helicopters, then there is a lot of thunder. Joint military exercises are seldom this big or complicated.

The article is a discussion based on the piece written by David Ignatius in the Washington Post, ‘The Islamic State Feeds Off Western Islamophobia.’ The article is interesting, controversial, and provoked some lively debate from its readers, some of whose views have been incorporated along with my own into the piece

Many other countries - in the West as well as in the Arab world - should take note of what a small, but evidently influential, country has achieved, principally by taking responsibility for its youth. Read more

On Saturday Australian police arrested four men in Sydney on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack. The target was believed to be an Etihad plane bound for Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The method of attack was apparently poisonous gas (hydrogen sulphide), which the bomb makers were attempting to hide in a mincing machine. The viability of such a method of attack is one issue, however the level of sophistication required to manufacture a device which would generate the conditions where a poisonous substance could be released in an aircraft in sufficient quantities to overcome its passengers and crew is another.

There was an incident on Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, where several white-nationalist groups protested the impending removal of a statue relating to the American Civil War (1861-1865) of Confederate General Robert E Lee.[1] They clashed with counter-protesters; eventually, police and the National Guard cleared the scene. Then a Dodge Challenger driven by a twenty-year-old from Ohio drove into the crowd of protestors killing one thirty-two-year–old woman. The driver has been remanded in custody and is charged with second-degree-murder.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/a-witness-to-terrorism-in-charlottesville

The fact which the Israelis believes in more than others is that Israel is an odd entity among a popular environment which rejects it and wishes its demise. For this reason, we see that the issue of security is always at the top of the Israeli political agenda and since the foundation of the Israeli entity, its sponsors do not accept any risk concerning "security of Israel". They always look with great concern for the future and do not wait for events but they deal with them long before they occur.

The dispute between four neighboring countries and Qatar centers in this gap between policies for stopping organization-driven “acts of terrorism” and policies all states need for detecting and preventing radicalization leading individuals to “violent extremism.”

“Islamic Caliphate is false and what is built on falsehood is false."
This comment was not addressed by one of the parties in the Global Coalition against ISIS, but it was posed by the leader of Al-Qaeda in Hadramout Khalid Baterfi[1] during the occupation of al-Mukalla city in 2015, which implies that there was no intention for Ansar al-Sharia (al-Qaeda branch in Mukalla) to achieve Caliphate in the city because of two absent conditions: First, the acquiring of the land, and the second is the consensus of the Muslims!

The US envoy for the coalition fighting Daesh, Brett McGurk’s statement where he said ‘his mission is to ensure that every foreign Daesh fighter in Syria dies in Syria,’ is not something which would surprise many international observers given the ‘gung ho’ policies of the Trump administration, particularly in relation to the war on terror. However, the statement from one of the UK’s international development ministers, Rory Stewart, may have raised some eyebrows amongst the political classes in the UK and Europe. Mr Stewart stated that Daesh members ‘pose a serious danger and the only way of dealing with them will be to kill them.’[1] The robustness of his statement which would ordinarily have been rebuked out of a fear of not being ‘po

In an interesting twist to an already complicated story, the unlikely saviour of al-Qaeda is alleged to be Iran which has apparently embarked on what is described as a remarkable pact with the Shia state. CIA director, Mike Pompeo, suggested the al-Qaeda-Iran pact had been an ‘open secret’ during the Obama administration, which had failed to act in order to push through the nuclear agreement.

The UK Home Office has decided to run a programme which reaches out to returning British Daesh jihadists and their families by providing council houses for them and counselling through de-radicalization programmes such as ‘Prevent.’ Whilst the concept has been denounced by the more hawkish right wing elements, it has been embraced by many who believe that it is the only way to monitor, de-radicalize and reintegrate the returnees back into civil society

As a consequence of the inevitable demise of Daesh in Iraq and Syria, for some time the militant group has been looking for countries where it can regroup and rebuild with a view to re-establishing its dream of creating a caliphate governed under the auspices of its extreme version of Islam. One particular view is that in the wake of the insurrection by a Daesh affiliate in the Philippines is that, despite the authorities in Manila putting down of the insurgency, that it is still a fertile ground for the movement to rise again and become a potent force in the region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the end of the military operation and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria, he also announced that more than 90% of the terrorists and bases in Syria have been eliminated, and that the Syrian army can eliminate the remnants of these groups.

Daesh’s caliphate is now virtually destroyed and the many towns and cities which fell to its ‘blitzkrieg’ conquest from 2014 onwards are now back in the hands of US-led coalition or President al-Assad’s regime forces. The only problem being that many of them are in ruins and will take many years to rebuild and repopulate